MC: Why were so many British soldiers attracted to the
prospect of adventures in Latin America?
MB: The first thing to remember is that only about a
third of the adventurers had actually been soldiers or sailors before they
travelled to Colombia. The vast majority were artisans, labourers, aristocrats
– a real cross-section of society, seduced by dreams of the gold and land and
freedom that they expected to find in South America. Of those who did have some
military experience (around 2,000 of the 7,000 foreign adventurers in total)
there were a lot of Irish Catholics who thought they had a better chance of
promotion in the Colombian service than in the British Army, and lots who saw
that military opportunities had dried up at home after the demobilisation that
came after the end of the Napoleonic Wars from 1815. It is a combination of
push factors and pull factors, giving people a reason to leave Britain and Ireland, as well as giving them a reason to go to South America.
MC: What sort of background were these soldiers from?
MB: 319 adventurers recorded their previous profession, trade or occupation
in a document preserved in the Archivo Histórico de Guayas in Guayaquil,
Ecuador. 148 described themselves as labourers. The next most popular
occupation was ‘Weaver’ (twenty-six). In descending order, eleven volunteers
said that they were shoemakers, and another eleven were tailors. Seven were
bakers, seven were mariners and six were musicians. There were five carpenters,
and four each of book-binders, breeches-makers, and painters. There were three
respondents each for bricklayer, butcher, hatter, miner, servant and
watch-maker. There were two respondents each for accountant, chandler, clerk,
cloth-cutter, cordwainer, craftsman, farrier, gardener, glass blower/stainer,
glazier, hairdresser, potter, printer, silk-maker and water-man. There was one
apothecary, a basket-maker, a blacksmith, a boat-maker, a cabinet-maker, a
cooper, a cotton spinner, a courier, a draper, a founder, a gunsmith, a
ham-beater, a horseman, a lawyer, a lightman, a machinist, a mason, a merchant,
a miller, a papermaker, a poulterer, a roller, a rope-maker, a saddler, a
sawyer, a shearer, a slater, a soapmaker, a stocking-maker, a stone-cutter, a
tanner, a tin-man, a varnish-maker, a wood-cutter, a wood Merchant and a
woollen draper.[1]
All this material is included in my online database of the soldiers. Some of the officers, of course, came from rather
grander backgrounds. There were a couple of lords in there, the sons of
aristocratic families. Many of the officers, however, exagerated their social
standing back home in order to gain a higher rank in the Colombian army – this
was a source of much tension, conflict and amusement once the campaigns got
going. It also meant that there were quite a few high-ranking officers who
didn’t have the faintest idea how to command soldiers or win battles.
MC: How were relations between Britain and Spain at the
time?
MB: Britain was neutral in the conflict between Spain
and its American colonies. This was because it had needed the Spanish alliance
against Napoleon’s France but also because it didn’t want to support the idea
of other powers piling into colonial conflicts on the side of rebels – this had
happened in the United States’ War of Independence in the late eighteenth
century, and Britain had enough of its own problems in the rest of its empire
without worrying if any rebels would get support from Spain, France, Prussia or
Russia, for example. So Britain had a public policy of neutrality.
Nevertheless, lots of the British public were in favour of Spanish American
independence because it chimed with their ideas about liberty, freedom, down
with tyranny, and so on. Also, many British merchants and their friends in
parliament and government were keen to have access to these new markets in
Spanish America, which had hitherto been very difficult to get into because of
the trade barriers erected by the Spanish colonial regime. The enlistment of
adventurers, in London, to fight in Colombia, kicked a great hole in the middle
of this delicate balancing act. Spanish officials in London were incandescent
that ships moored on the River Thames could be so bare-faced about recruiting
men. That’s why the ‘Foreign Enlistment Act’ was brought in in 1819, and after
that the recruitment of adventurers did rather dry up. The British policy of
neutrality survived, independence was eventually achieved, and the merchants
did indeed get access to the new markets. So, everyone won (except for the
Spanish, who had lost all their American colonies by 1826, apart from Cuba and
Puerto Rico).
MC: What were the differences in armoury between the
British and the Royalist fighters?
MB: That is a good question. Military historians have
rooted round in archives trying to answer this question, and archaeologists have
unearthed surviving weapons from the period. Broadly speaking the weapons being
used on either side were quite similar. Bayonets, rifles and lances were the
principal weapons. Obviously each new expedition, either from Britain or Spain,
brought new weapons with it. Many of the British officers spent a lot of time
teaching recruits how to use them, for example the rifles, but the vast majority of battles were fought
using weapons like swords, daggers, knives and lances. The battle of Junín, in
Peru in 1824, was famously silent, with no gunfire at all, given the
topographical difficulties in dragging cannons up and down the Andean mountain
ranges, and without getting the gunpowder wet.
MC: Did the British soldiers respect the leadership of
Bolivar and Sucre?
MB: I think on the whole the answer here was yes, but
not always. Bolívar had a certain charisma which appealed to his British
soldiers, and they played a crucial part in transmitting his revolutionary
image across the Atlantic. Sucre got on well with most of the British and Irish
officers. Francisco Burdett O’Connor, an Irish adventurer, has a lovely
anecdote in his memoirs, published in Spanish as Independencia americana, about he and Sucre tossing a coin in order
to decide which should of them should be allowed to court a particular woman. Clearly
there was a lot of mutual respect there. Of course not all leadership was respected:
British and Irish soldiers deserted all the time (rates of 10% per year were
not unknown) and the Irish Legions staged a famous rebellion at the Caribbean
port of Riohacha in 1820. (I have an article on the Rebellion at Riohacha in 1820 and its consequences).
They made a real mess of the town, caused a load of havoc and got themselves a
really bad reputation.
MC: And I was wondering if it was possible for you to
give a couple of other reasons, non-military, how the British influenced the
independence of the nations which temporarily became Colombia.
MB: Crikey: that’s a big question. I suggest you read
The Role of Great Britain in the Independence of Colombia, the volume edited by Malcolm Deas, published by the Colombian Embassy in London. All in all, you have the military assistance, the diplomatic neutrality, the
arms sales, the public support and solidarity as well as the provision of a
cultural and political model (as argued by the historian Karen Racine in her
article ‘This England, This Now’: British Cultural Independence in the Spanish
American Independence-Era’, Hispanic
American Historical Review (2010). That’s quite a lot of British influence,
but independence was still, clearly, primarily the work of Colombians,
Venezuelans and Ecuadorians, who fought, wrote, died, thought, argued, saved
and battled for their independence – with a little help from their friends.
[1]
This paragraph is taken from my book, Matthew Brown, Adventuring through Spanish Colonies: Simón Bolívar, Foreign
Mercenaries and the Birth of New Nations (Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2006), 28.